|
Living in an era when severe social restrictions were imposed on
women, Kamlabai Gokhale achieved success as a stage actress and went
on to become the first lady of the Indian silver screen.
The first screening of
the Lumiere brothers’ films in India was held at Bombay’s
Watson Hotel in 1896. there was a spate of documentary shooting in
the following years and by 1913 the first feature film had been
accomplished.
However, of the 1300
silent films made in India, only fragments of 13 remain. Of the
hundreds of technicians and artistes who pioneered and invented, who
strove to overcome both the limitations of technology and the severe
social restrictions imposed by gender, caste and creed, who laid the
foundations of the film industry in India as we know it, very few
survive to tell the story of their struggle and their inspiration.
Kamlabai Gokhale is one
of them.
This then is the story of
the first lady of the Indian silver screen and one of the first
actresses of the Indian stage…
Durgabai Kamat was a
young woman when she separated from her husband, Anand Nanoskar, a
professor of history at the J.J. School of Art, in 1903. Alone, with
a daughter to support, Durgabai had three options before her-to work
as a domestic servant, to prostitute herself or to become an actress.
Socially, they were equally reprehensible. Durgabai decided to join
a travelling theatre company. The outraged Maharashtrian Brahmin
community immediate ostracized her and thus the little Kamlabai was
raised, surrounded by controversy in a world of glitter and artifice.
“My mother was not
only beautiful but very talented as well. She could paint and sing
and was proficient at instruments like the been, dilruba, kartal
and sitar. She had been educated upto final which was the
seventh standard in those days… I never went to school since we
were always on the move so my mother taught me at home.”
Despite her mother’s
legendary beauty, the obstacles to her career were many. Kamlabai
recounts, “In those days, men played the female roles. So the
fiercest opposition to my mother and me came from these men-we were
their first natural enemies. Some companies just would not hire
women as a rule…”
“My first stage
appearance was at the age of four… during the performance I
would often doze off in some backstage corner, and then be woken up
by a hard tap on the head each time I had to make an entry. However,
my voice was real drawback. As a child I had a thin voice which
cracked with the high notes. So I was made a prompter which proved
to be a blessing in disguise because I improved on my ability to read
and memorize as I said I never went to school…” For a
while the young Kamlabai was content to watch and learn. A decade
later, she was to become one of the most popular artistes of her
time.
Today Kamlabai Gokhale is
91 years old. She lives alone in a small flat in complete anonymity,
visited occasionally by her older son, Chandrakant, a well known
stage and film actor. She is crippled and mostly confined to her
bed. But she remains alert and vivacious, full of poignant memories
of her early years.
Around 1912-1913
Dadasaheb Phalke, the pioneering film-maker of India, was casting
for his film “Mohini Bhasmasur” and he chose Kamlabai for
the lead role. Durgabai was Parvati. This was something of a
momentous event. Phalke had been forced to use a young male cook,
Salunke, to play the female lead in his earlier film “Raja
Harishchandra” for lack of an actress.
And so it was that by the
time she was not yet 15, Kamlabai had become a celebrity. Her
memories of the shoot are still vivid-“All his equipment had
come from England… we stayed at his house in Nasik, and would
wake up at 4 a.m. to travel to Trimbakeshwar, three hours away, by
bullock cart. From dawn till dusk we would be shooting. We had no
artificial lights like the ones used today… all the shooting
would have to be done in available light with reflectors. Dadasaheb
was very patient and understanding and would explain in great detail
all that he wanted us to do. Once the rehearsals were done to his
satisfaction, he proceeded for a ‘take’. Though there was
no sound, we used to mouth the words of the dialogue. The unit lived
and worked together like one big family. There was a five-fold
salary structure, the highest being Rs. 50/-, with free lodging and
boarding… When Dada returned from England after showing the film
abroad he had to undergo a purification ritual because he had dared
to cross the seas. Such were the times…”
The following year she
married Raghunathrao Gokhale. He had been with the Kirloskar Natak
Company where he usually performed female roles. But his voice was
breaking and so he moved to his brother’s company which was the
same one where Kamlabai and her mother were employed. The young
couple was cast as the new lead pair of the company.
The most popular plays of
the time were based on historic and mythological themes. Adaptations
of Shakespeare’s plays were also widely performed-“Hamlet”,
“Romeo and Juliet”, and “Othello” were staged in
town and villages all over Maharashtra. By 1918 the couple had
carved a niche for themselves, drawing packed houses wherever they
went.
Commenting on the
difference between theatre and film Kamlabai says, “Theatre
acting is done within norms of restraint. It is symbolic,
particularly in love scenes. On the stage you can keep your
distance, decided your limit and say, I will go no further. But for
a love scene in a film you embrace, you really embrace, otherwise it
would make no sense.”
Her memories of those
days are vivid. Eighty bullock carts carrying a hundred and twenty
five people travelled the length and breadth of the region. They had
their own tailors, goldsmiths and ironsmiths accompanying them.”
…We used to advertise through handbills. Damuanne Mavlankar
used to distribute them himself on a motorbike. Sometimes may
husband or I used to accompany him in the sidecar. Our dog,
Jehangir, used to have a brass ring around his neck under which we
would place the folded handbills. When the motorbike started the
handbills used to fly away.”
Kamlabai was not yet 25
when she became a widow, pregnant with her third child. “I had
to work with men keeping a strict control over my senses. It was a
matter of just one slip. I had my family-my mother and children-to
take care of. As for women, they had always maintained a distance
from me. I was not considered respectable enough though I was just
like them, a mother with children. The only advantage they could
think of was getting free passes for a show...”
Her son, Chandrakant, who
is visiting her says, “love for theatre, loyalty to the
state-words we often use-she demonstrated these to us during those
years of struggle. When my father was dying, she was determined that
the shows should not get cancelled and took his place as the male
lead. The times were such that it was impossible for a woman to move
about freely. Even educated women did not move out of the house
after 6 p.m. ….Buts after the death of our father the
responsibility of looking after us fell on my mother. About 60-65
years ago, my mother’s salary was Rs. 225/-; all other expenses
were paid for by the company… She worked with various
companies-the “Manohar Stree Sangeet Natak Mandal”, in
Sohrab Modi’s theatre unit, with Govind Lele and Ganpat Lele of
“Natya Kala Prasarak” … She even acted in a Kannada
play, “Lanka Dahan” although she was not conversant with
the language. Within a week she had learnt the lines by heart and
the play was staged to packed houses…”
He eldest son, Lalji,
recalls, “we-that is, Chandrakant, myself and the other children
of the company-were given song books to sell. The cost of each of
these was one rupee and four annas, our commission being two annas.
Besides we got the opportunity of seeing the play free. I remember
her in “Dharmasinhasan,” in the male leads in both “Janta
Janardhan” and “Manapman”…as Anadibai she
performed the role so effectively that people used to wait outside
Vijayanand Theatre in Pune with stones in their hands and she had to
be escorted back to our house in a tonga…”
In the 30s Kamlabai
worked under Veer Savarkar in the play “Ushaap” which
focussed on the plight of Harijans. “Working with him was
completely different from anything I had done before. Savarkar was
living under house arrest in those days and would come to rehearsals
under police escort. A translated copy of the play would have to be
approved by the local British officer wherever we performed to ensure
that nothing subversive was being enacted…”
The real disaster for the
family came in 1934-35 after Ardeshir Irani, an intrepid Parsi,
pushed the Indian cinema out of the silent ear with the first talkie
“Alam Ara”. The multitude of roving drama companies in
Maharashtra, the only other state to have them apart from Bengal,
reeled under the impact. For the first time the family settled down.
“For a while I did “kirtans,” but the day I got 7
paise in my “thali” I quit-so humiliated was by the
experience.”
The evocation is not
simply nostalgic, but a strong testimony of history and change- of
the history of Indian cinema and stage as defined by a woman’s
struggle against the social current of her times. Looking back she
says, “all this has been tough, but then anything worthwhile
is always tough…”
| 
